


Smile at the Moon

by melonbug



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Horror, Dreams and Nightmares, F/M, Hallucinations, Hysteria, Post-War, Pregnancy Scares, Sharingan, Vomiting, not so happily ever after
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-13
Updated: 2018-12-13
Packaged: 2019-09-17 12:17:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16974450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melonbug/pseuds/melonbug
Summary: She has the dream again. And again. And again. Something is wrong and Sakura doesn't know what.





	Smile at the Moon

The Konoha in Sakura’s dreams is barren and dead, a scattered waste that holds scarcely more than a memory of what it once was. She stands amongst the rubble of what was once the Hokage Tower and thinks,  _ the Hokage must be dead _ .

She isn’t sure which one she’s thinking of; such is the nature of dreams to be vague and unhelpful like that. Maybe all of them? And there will never again be another one.

She knows it.

In the distance she can see cliff faces, cliffs that once held the images of the now all dead (mostly dead?) Kages. She can make out the remnants of spiky hair that once adorned the top of a face. She’s no idea who it belonged to though.

On the ground below the cliffs she sees a large boulder that vaguely resembles a nose. It likely was, at one point in time.

The entire village is sepia toned, washed of all color and void of any life, save for her. She’s never dreamed of the village any other way. Sometimes, in her more lucid dreaming, she tries to imagine the sun shining down on this crumbling, dead place, but her dreams always falter there. There is such a caricature of sadness and loss within this village that even in the privacy of her dreams the sun refuses to look down upon it.

The wind speaks to her, quiet and sharp, words of such importance that her entire body aches with the burden of them. And yet she can never hear them, can never make out or distinguish the individual words. But they are important because she can feel it down to her bones, can recognize the voice with deep pain in her heart.

She can never remember who it belongs to when she wakes.

  
  


Sakura wakes, gasping, to a quiet bedroom illuminated by a stream of moonlight pouring in from a window. She clenches her fingers into the tangled sheets around her, catching her breath and trying hard to remember the dream she had been having. If she closes her eyes she can see, burned into the back of her eyelids, the image of a burning Konoha illuminated by a blood red sky. The image fades as quickly as it comes to her though and she gives up on remembering anything more.

Sasuke lays beside her, watching her with tired eyes. “Bad dream?” he asks softly, reaching out to tuck a strand of hair out of her face. She shudders violently and hopes, rather stupidly, that he doesn’t notice.

Of course he does, his quiet acknowledgement marked by a frown.

She nods weakly and her eyes flicker from him to the lump situated between them—a small girl who is buried snug in the blankets, nothing but her black mop of hair poking out. Sakura frowns and looks back up to Sasuke, who notices her confusion. “She was having a bad dream, too,” he murmurs. “Seems to be happening a lot lately.”

He must have misunderstood her confusion, she realizes, eyes drifting back to the girl. She isn’t sure what it is she can’t figure out, but It’s on the tip of her tongue, buried by cloudy thoughts and distant nightmares of a long dead village. She nods anyway though, too tired to figure it out now.

It comes to her later, out of nowhere as she is drifting off again.

 

_ Sarada _ , her groggy mind supplies.  _ Sarada is the girl, and Sarada is their daughter _ .

  
  


The next morning finds her sitting at the kitchen table, watching as the girl—Sarada, her daughter—sits in a chair too large for her and swings her feet back and forth as she pushes food around her plate.

Sakura’s own food remains untouched. Behind her Sasuke is in and out of the room, scarfing down mouthfuls of food as he prepares his weapons for the day. She can’t remember what type of mission he has, if he has one at all.

A kunai sits discarded on the edge of the table and Sakura picks it up, testing the weight of it in her hands. It feels foreign, the weight and texture a sharp contrast to the scalpel she wields now at the hospital. She spins it in her hand so she is holding it properly and the blade glints dully in the light. The movement sends a rush through her.

She doesn’t go on missions very often anymore. There is too little conflict in these times of peace and the hospital is booming and bustling and she is the best suited to run it. It is an honor and a privilege to be head of the hospital and it pays well, but she sometimes misses the rush of the battlefield far more than she should.

“Momma?”

Sakura jumps and drops the kunai on the table with a loud clang. From across the table Sarada peers at her curiously, her eyes sharp and perceptive from behind red rimmed glasses. Something in the way the girl looks at her sends chills down her spine and she tries and fails to brush the feeling aside.

“Momma, can I hold it?” She looks uncharacteristically excited and Sakura nods without thinking.

Sarada clambers from her chair to grab the kunai. It’s far too large for her and it takes both of her small hands to grasp it around the hilt as she mimes stabbing something with it. Sakura watches with a sick horror rising in her stomach.

Sasuke steps over, laughing, and pulls the kunai from her. In one, practiced movement he picks her up and puts her back in her chair. She looks almost comical sitting there pouting.

“You know you’re not old enough yet, Sarada,” he says slipping the kunai into a pouch strapped around his leg. “You’ll get your own soon enough.” He ruffles her hair and turns his back on her, giving Sakura a strange look and mouthing something at her. Sakura doesn’t catch what he’s saying, though—she’s met Sarada’s eyes over his shoulder. The longer she looks the more her eyes seem to change and a too large grin breaks out across the girl’s face. For a brief, horrifying second, Sakura thinks she sees the girl’s eyes flash red and black.

“Run along now, Sarada. I’ll meet you outside in a moment,” Sasuke’s voice startles her and she blinks. When she looks at Sarada again her eyes are dark, as they are supposed to be—as onyx black as her father’s. It does nothing to stop the racing of Sakura’s heart.

She is vaguely aware of Sasuke speaking to her as she watches the girl grab her backpack and run out the door. The sick feeling in her stomach has risen and she feels bile in the back of her throat. The distance to the sink seems infinite and she stumbles over to it just in time to heave up what little of her breakfast she’s managed to eat.

Sasuke is behind her at once, pulling her hair out of her face and murmuring softly.

His concern sends a rush of inexplicable anger through her and she brushes him off.

“I’m fine,” she says, turning on the faucet. “Go. Sarada’s going to be late for class.” She can feel a headache coming on and she desperately wants to be alone with it.

Sasuke looks for a moment as if he is about to protest but Sakura knows he won’t. He has an admirable amount of respect for her, enough to take her word on this even if it isn’t true. 

Perhaps she knows him too well because sure enough he shuts his mouth and heads for the door. “Maybe you should stay home today,” he says, pausing.

“Maybe I will,” she replies. She knows she won’t, though.

  
  


The pale fluorescence of the hospital lights only worsen her headache. By the fifth hour of her shift her head is pounding and she feels nausea rising in her stomach once more. She ducks into the bathroom just in time.

A few minutes later she stands, shaking, in front of the mirror, cold water dripping and running down her pale face. The splash of water has woken her up a bit and the nausea disappeared with the lunch she just threw up. But her headache remains, violent and throbbing, and she presses a trembling hand to her head. The green glow of chakra rushing to her hand casts a sickly pallor across her reflection in the mirror and she squeezes her eyes closed lest the light worsen her headache.

When she opens them again she almost screams, the noise catching itself in her throat at the last minute. For a brief second a Sharingan stares back at her from her right eye, red and violent and intense in its spinning. The shock makes her blink and then it’s gone, only her normal green eyes staring back at her.

Tentatively she reaches up and prods at her cheek, just below her eye, her breaths shaky as she draws them. Her eye still stares back at her, green.

She leaves work early and tries not to notice how, on her way home, the greens of the trees seem greener and the blue of the sky seems bluer and brighter and beautiful. Something is wrong and she does not at all want to think about what it is.

  
  


Sakura sighs and drops a cube of sugar into her tea, stirring it with slow, mechanical motions. Ino sits opposite her, excitedly filling her in on all of the latest gossip and her voice is a too loud cacophony against Sakura’s growing headache

She’s been getting them more and more lately.

“–and I think Hinata might be pregnant again. Sakura are you listening?”

She blinks and flushes with embarrassment. She raises her stare from her rapidly cooling tea and looks at her friend who looks back at her with a no doubt practiced pout.

“I think  _ I _ might be pregnant,” she says, though they aren’t the words she’d wanted to speak when she’d opened her mouth. She frowns sharply, wracking her brain for where the thought had even come from. But as soon as she speaks it, it becomes true in her mind.

The nausea, the strange dreams, the constant queasiness and headaches. Maybe she is pregnant.

Ino sets her glass down with a sharp clink, eyes wide. “Sakura,” she begins, and Sakura waves the conversation off.

“I’m not ready to talk about it,” she says. “I’m not certain yet. I don’t even know why I said anything.”

Ino, usually, is nothing if not persistent. She reads the situation well, though, and lets it be. The conversation returns again to Hinata and Naruto. Sakura is weary of it and finds an excuse soon enough to leave.

“My head,” she says, gesturing to her temple. It does hurt, it hurts more and more.

She goes home and vomits.

  
  


One night she remembers the words in her dream.  _ You need to wake up, _ the voice says. She looks up, seeking it out in the ashen swirl of the breeze, and she sees a blood red sky, a sharingan spinning lazily within it where the moon should be. We she looks down it is Kakashi standing there. There's a gaping hole where his sharingan should be. 

She realizes the voice was his. All along, it had been him. “Don't look at the sky,” he says. It's a command.

There’s an expression: If you tell someone not to think of a blue elephant then they  _ will _ . Because they’ve been told not to. Because the act of mentioning it at all brings it to mind. This is similar. All Sakura wants to do in this moment is to look at the sky. Her eyes drift upward but they don’t drift passed the wreckage of the Hokage monument.

“Don’t look at the sky,” Kakashi pleads. “Don’t.”

She wants to see it again, the sharingan swirling in the night sky. Every fiber of her being cries for her to.

“Don’t,” he says again. He steps towards her and she flinches. She has never in her life been squeamish or averse to the sight of blood or gore; she’s a medic, after all. But something about the gaping carnage that was once Kakashi’s eyes turns her stomach. “Sakura,” he murmurs. “You have to wake up.  _ Wake up! _ ”

She does with a strangled cry, and she remembers this time. But she doesn’t understand.

  
  


“We haven’t seen Kakashi in a while,” Sakura murmurs to Sasuke the next morning. It’s all she can think about; the way Kakashi’s good eye had stared at her, the pleas tumbling from him. She pinches her brow and glances over to Sarada who is distracted by a textbook spread open on the counter.

Sasuke gives her a funny look, but she ignores it. He’s been giving her a lot of funny looks lately and she’s tired. She doesn’t really care.

“We should have him over for dinner soon,” she says, and Sasuke stares at her. There’s the concerned look.

“Sakura?” She fixes her eyes on his. His voice is slow and careful. “Are you sure you’re doing alright?”

She is, she definitely is. She had woken— _ wake up _ , whispering into her mind—and she had felt better than she had in years. She manages a soft smile even though she knows it will do nothing to alleviate Sasuke’s concern. “I’m fine.”

Sasuke continues to stare, brow pinched. “Skur,” he says slowly. Sarada lifts her eyes from her book and stares at her as well. “Kakashi is dead.”

Sakura wants to laugh and she bites her lip, willing it down. She’s on the edge of hysteria, because of course Kakashi is dead. Of course he would haunt her dreams, taunt her with nonsensical riddles. It’s all so very Kakashi.

Instead she takes a deep breath and laughs it off. Plays it as a throw away thought, a result of the stress of the hospital, her lack of sleep. She mumbles out, “Yes, of course,” and Sasuke let’s it go and ushers Sarada out to the academy.

 

She reaches the hospital to a quiet day and she  _ hates _ it. She wants panic and mayhem, bleeding, dead corpses. She can see herself, standing amongst them, mourning the dead. Now she wants it, because everything about how calm the hospital is feels abnormal.

 

Once, there had been a war. And she had fought in it, she had killed in it, she had saved in it. It feels like a faraway past, now. She closes her eyes and she sees it, after so long. How long had it been?

How old is Sarada, she thinks. Six, seven? Had it been ten years since the war? Eleven? She struggles to remember it and she can’t. At some point the world as she knew it now had fallen into place around her and she had accepted it.

She has a husband and a daughter, and that was the life she had dreamed of.

 

Nothing feels right and she doesn’t know why.

 

She has another lunch with Ino, maybe a week after the last one. Her friend shows up at the hospital and ushers her away with a tight smile and with purpose. This isn’t a lunch so much as it is maybe an intervention. Sakura can feel the intent and the concern rolling off of her as Ino grins and laughs and leads her to this cafe that Choji had recommended.

“Something new, right?” she says as they take a seat. “Something different.”

Her smile is tight and Sakura doesn’t let her dance around any of it for a second. “My husband spoke to you, didn’t he?” She returns Ino’s tight smile as the girl finally drops it.

“Sakura,” she begins, clearly thinking carefully over her words. “Are you okay?”

Sakura drags in a breath. “I’m fine,” she tells her. Maybe if she says it enough it will be true.

In all honesty, she doesn’t know or understand what is happening to her, why she has suddenly become this way. She knows her behavior is erratic but she’s hard pressed to know why or to change course. She’s spiralling and there’s no end in sight.

_ Wake up! _

She laughs. Kakashi is dead. It was only a dream.

“Sakura,” Ino says again. “Sakura, you and Sasuke aren’t married.”

She chokes on her own spit and plays it off as she had played off the surprising news about Kakashi. “Well, no,” she confirms. She and Sasuke weren’t married, but they had a child. They had Sarada, however she had entered into their lives. It feels right, though. Sasuke was never one to settle, and Sakura herself was never one to settle for anyone. Even Sasuke. “Just an expression, right?”

Of course they had never bothered to marry.

She smiles brighter and Ino seems to accept the response.

“He’s worried about you,” she continues over her tea. “He said you’ve been acting strange.”

Sakura doesn’t answer but instead props her chin up on her hand. She’s tired. That’s all she has to say.

“Is it because you’re pregnant?”

Sakura’s arm slips and she sends her face nearly crashing down. Pregnant, had she— She frowns and remembers. Maybe she is, she hadn’t given much thought to it since their last conversation. Carefully she presses her hand to her stomach, searching for a chakra signal in vain. It wouldn’t manifest until late in, but it was a comfort to her that it wasn’t there. “Ino,” she tells her bluntly, “I might not be pregnant.”

“Sakura, you should check into this sort of thing, I mean, if you  _ are _ , maybe it’s what’s—” She trails off.

Sakura nods. “Maybe,” she agrees. “ _ Soon _ . I don’t know if I’m ready for the answer yet.” It seems an easy excuse.

They fall into a comfortable silence. Sakura wants to say something but she isn’t sure what. So she doesn’t. Eventually Ino pulls them back into their normal routine; she smiles and gossips and dishes on all of the new, juicy somethings she’s got to tell.

But Sakura’s thoughts are elsewhere. The sudden realization that she might be pregnant is making her think and their thoughts as confusing as all the others she’s been having.

“Ino?” Ino comes to a full stop. “Do you remember when Sarada was born?” How old was Sarada now? Seven? Eight? She realizes she can’t remember. It’s all through a fog, a thick one that settles over her and turns her round and makes her lost.

It was the wrong thing to say. Ino can’t hide her worry. “Of course. I was  _ there _ , Sakura.”

 

She has the dream again and it’s more vivid than before. Kakashi is there again, closer to her, empty eye sockets oozing gore; she looks down at her hands and they’re drenched with blood almost to her elbows.

“Sakura,” Kakashi says. “Don’t look at the sky.”

 

When she wakes up, she’s not alone; Sasuke is next to her, warm and pressed against her side. But there’s someone else and her eyes find a dark silhouette in the darkness; sharingan eyes blaze red across the room at her and she meets them. She wants to scream but she can’t; the noise catches in her throat.

She blinks though she doesn’t want to; she knows the moment she does they’ll be gone. And when she blinks they are, and in their place is Sarada, stepping sluggishly closer, shuffling and shivering in the cold of the room.

“I had a bad dream,” Sarada murmurs. Her voice is small and soft. Sakura makes room for her without thinking, pushing at Sasuke; he rolls over but doesn’t wake up and Sarada climbs into the bed. She’s shaking and Sakura combs her hands through the girls hair.

 

The next morning Sarada is fine, but something doesn’t sit right with Sakura. She can’t shake it anymore. Something is wrong; seriously wrong. She’s just not sure if what’s wrong is her or the world around her.


End file.
